FOR A FOOD ENTHUSIAST and dyed-in-the-wool royalist such as me, it is hard to imagine a more exciting headline than the one in The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, which ran: “Prince’s cookbook reveals secrets of royal kitchens.” Now, what could possibly be more exciting than the secrets of a royal kitchen? Unless, of course, the secrets of a royal kitchen are similar to the secrets of any kitchen, except that they are known only by royal people. If we are merely to learn, for example, that the keys to the patio door at Clarence House are kept in the Sugar Puffs, or that the oven light will only come on if you hold the door shut with your knee and then bang the timer hard with a rolling pin, well, then I may give it a miss.

But I have rather higher hopes. Introducing the news item by asserting, “It is well-known that the late Queen Mother’s favourite cake was a date and walnut Sodbury” (Telegraph readers know such different things from the rest of us), the journalist reveals that: “The Prince of Wales has decided to disclose the recipe in his first cookbook,” a book that will, through the recipes, “offer a glimpse of royal life through the kitchen window” . That’s the sort of thing we want, recipes with a bit of a story: the hilarious gingerbread fuzzy-wuzzies cooked by the Duke of Edinburgh for a teatime visit from the King of Togo; the Sunday lunch Diana kept down all afternoon; the pair of blancmanges Prince Andrew mistook for a dancing girl and only lost interest in three weeks into their honeymoon . . .

Alas, all the Telegraph has for us by way of a preview of these “glimpses of royal life” is a promise that the book will unravel “the mysteries of the Maid of Honour Tarts Anne Boleyn reportedly used to woo Henry VIII”.

Again, the tolerance of that paper’s indulgent readership for news that is not absolutely throbbing with modernity is notable (and I do love the reporter’s cautious use of the word “reportedly” — just in case Anne Boleyn chooses to instruct those nice gentleman from Mishcon de Reya).

But I do feel compelled to observe, for the benefit of readers hoping to use the aphrodisiacal tarts for their own libidinous ends, that seducing Henry VIII does not appear — just looking at the bald statistics — to have been especially difficult. At the time of the Anne Boleyn episode Henry was 20 years into a loveless marriage with his long dead brother’s 4ft, middle-aged, Spanish, utterly minging widow. Anne was half his age, with a lithe, athletic body, big tits and a widely rumoured familiarity with the continental bedroom arts, and who had repeatedly declared herself, in the parlance of the day, to be “bange uppe for it”.

My guess is that her baking skills were neither here nor there.

But anyway. Prince Charles has written a cookbook. And it comes out in the same week as the autobiography of the much more famous, and only marginally less articulate Gordon Ramsay. A very different read, I would imagine. For while the Ramsay recipe for scrambled eggs on toast is: “Eggs. Crack. Into the pan. F****** scramble. That’ll be £23 not including service. Now f*** off,” his Royal Highness’s version is a little less direct “Scrambled eggs. Ah, well. Um. Yeeeeerrsss. It’s devilish hard to know where to begin. Let us assume, for the moment, that one has about the place a number of eggs. The thing to do is to commandeer a proportion of these eggs, I’m not absolutely certain how many. It’s so hard to tell, looking at them. Have you ever noticed how when the hen lays them they are all hard and brown and oblongy round, and then when they arrive on the breakfast tray on hot-buttered toast they’re yellow and fluffy? I don’t mind admitting that it wasn’t until I got to Cambridge that someone ex-plained the two things were related. It’s deucedly clever.

“Where was I? Oh yes. Of course. I’ll assume one has ones pile of eggs.Although ‘pile’ is probably the wrong word, isn’t it? One can’t really pile up eggs, I suppose. At least, I can’t. The thing to do now, as far as I understand it, is to — how shall one put this? — smash them. No doubt using some sort of blunt instrument or, if you have a way with these things, perhaps with a specially devised egg-smashing contraption. Although I’m pretty useless with the new technology. I dare say young people do all this on the interweb these days.

“The thing now is very much to put the eggs in a pan. Whatever ‘in a pan’ means. And then, if I’m not being too hasty, to, well, to — there’s no pleasant way to say this — bash them about with a stick.

“Ah. Hang on a tick. I suppose I should have said that before smashing the eggs one should position a bowl of some kind underneath the eggs, to catch them. Or if you’re not familiar with where the bowls are kept, have someone do it for you. But by now you’ve probably got them all over the floor of the bathroom, or wherever it is you’ve chosen to attempt to make this wretched dish. If you’ve got any on your trousers, though, don’t worry, I know an excellent trick for getting egg out of tweed plus-fours. All you have to do is . . . Oh, excuse me for two shakes.

“What’s that? Ah, yeeeeers. Apparently I am not allowed to pass it on until after the publication of my book of housekeeping tips, which is due out in time for Christmas. Pip, pip.”

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